Rick's Notes
September 2004
2004/09/01 and 2004/09/07
The Digibox is 'dead' again (I know I shouldn't call it 'dead', but...). Inside, the signal strength is about a third. Outside, directly connected to the dish, the strength is full bar. Pointed to Sky/BBC and pointed to the older birds at 19.2°E shows me the exact same thing - a good signal strength (the picture is PERFECT in analogue!) but the box refuses to lock. No signal quality whatsoever.
I have used the correct symbol rate and FEC settings to no avail. For the hell of it, I worked
through all of the FECs on both supported symbol rates.
Nada, nothing, zip, rien.
I tried a direct access to three or four channels on 28.2°E, and I tried directly accessing
every one of my shorter list of 19.2°E channels twice.
Has anybody experienced or heard of anything like this? I could believe the box is overheating
if it came back after cooling down, but it has been left for a week. The last time it had to sit for quite a bit longer (!). I even tried gently tapping around the motherboard to see if it was some sort of loose connection or broken track. Nothing but nothing gets the signal quality to budge.
Help! This is extremely confusing! Why does this box work so well, and then not
for a long period of time?
2004/09/24
Been listening to Alouette for about an hour. It is breaking up a lot,
but then the dish may be slightly off alignment, it was okay for analogue.
I'm loath to realign to 28.2 because that means dragging the TV and the Digibox outside; and for how long will the box receive before I'm back to 19.2 analogue?
What I need is a sat finder so I can just go out and 'point' the dish. A friend has promised me
one, so we'll see how that method works.
The Digibox... and when is a remote one remote too many?
Perhaps I should look for another Digibox with these symptoms? One can work one week, the other the next...? Hehehe!
I've updated the short channel list (19.2°E) as a new channel has arrived and TVEi has moved.
The longer list will be updated in due course.
It's a shame I can't use this IrDA thingy as a "learning remote"!
I've added a bunch of pictures. Sorry for the delay. The laptop I'm currently using does not have networking (if anybody has an unwanted PCMCIA 10baseT card...?) and the floppy drive is quirky to the point of nearly being broken (I've cleaned it several times). So I had to wait until I had a web site update to put onto CD-R. I copied the pictures onto the same session. :-)
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